“My ministry is not for everyone, it is for those who have faith. I’m just a messenger of God’s work. God heals people in our meetings.” ∼ Prophet Shepherd Bushiri
“The miracles and the teachings that our father teaches every week are so amazing. I’ve also been struggling to get a job and came here and I got two jobs at the same time and it was a matter of choosing.” ∼ 24-year-old Xolani Msibi, of Prophet Bushiri
“We are now in healing mode. God is addressing our problems, he is addressing our challenges.” ∼ President Cyril Ramaphosa
The message matters, of course it does, but the language in which it is couched can be no less telling. Over the past week, the ANC put before SA two fundamentally different pieces of prose. They are worth looking at, for style and tone.
The first of these was a series of tweets from Ramaphosa on February 1, presented as if some Christian hymn of old. Oozing optimism and hope, they fairly bristled with the unbridled enthusiasm of a charismatic pastor.
The second was a statement by the ANC in response to a series of informal comments by a group of five western countries, actually sent in June 2018 but which erupted onto the scene this past Sunday. Recalcitrant and hysterical, it read like someone had reached back into time and pulled a passage from 1935 from a Soviet Union playbook on anti-imperialist propaganda.
“Guide me O Thou Great Redeemer” ∼ William Williams, 1745
Let us have a look at each in turn, starting with our panglossian president. Here he is in his full, concatenated glory.
“SA is calling on all of us. SA is making a servant call on all of us to say let us come together and work to build and grow our country. SA is calling on me to build this country and make sure that it works and succeeds. This is an exciting moment — we will look back and say we were around when it happened. We will say we went through this moment and we emerged out of this period with greater strength, with greater determination and a commitment to move our country forward. We are in a period of renewal. Let us embrace this period of renewal; let us be determined to move ahead to build the SA of our dreams, because beyond the moment of darkness comes daybreak.
“This is what awaits us as we take a few more steps forward. We are in a period of renewal. Let us embrace this period of renewal; let us be determined to move ahead to build the SA of our dreams, because beyond the moment of darkness comes daybreak. This is what awaits us as we take a few more steps forward. Beyond this valley, will be redemption and total renewal. Those who have been involved in malfeasance, wrongdoing and corruption, must stand and be accountable to the nation. That is what this moment is calling for. We are cleansing the country and getting ready for the next mission. Beyond what we are going through now, we will emerge much stronger and much more determined. The current processes are taking us through a catharsis, that will lead us to redemption. Let us not be too alarmed.”
Hallelujah brother. Praise be. Only, we aren’t really cleansing anything, are we? What we are doing is revealing. The cleansing will come, if it ever comes, when people are locked up in jail
It builds up, like the best hymns do, to the idea of a promised land and a crescendo of millenarian hyperbole. You can almost hear the drums in the background, carrying you inexorably on, towards the New Jerusalem.
“We are in a period of renewal”, the president says. Speak for yourself. Seems more like a period of utter and total moral depravity. But then reality always has been the enemy, if not the counterpoint, for religious fervour.
Onward Christian soldiers. “Beyond the moment of darkness comes daybreak.”
“Beyond this valley, will be redemption and total renewal,” the president chanted with a rhythmical belief. “Total renewal” is not a comforting idea. Most ideas preceded by the word “total” are disconcerting. In turn, it’s the disjuncture that grates. This idea that we are all sinners. All complicit. This is not an ANC problem, it is an SA problem, and all must bend their knee and repent.
“We are cleansing the country and getting ready for the next mission”, the president declares. Hallelujah brother. Praise be. Only, we aren’t really cleansing anything, are we? That is, when you really think about it. What we are doing is revealing. And only partially at that. The cleansing will come, if it ever comes, when people are locked up in jail. That seems a long way away.
And what we are revealing is a pit of mismanagement and corruption, the bottom of which we have yet to have sight of. Maybe there is no bottom. Maybe it goes down forever. It gets deeper every day, of that you can be sure.
But no. The president is already “getting ready for the next mission”. There are more to convert. The good shepherd must bring back into his flock all those who have strayed. His flock, a collection of the diseased and grotesquely deformed, all of whom have grown fat on despair and self-interest. Let them come together, so that they may “lead us to redemption”.
“Join us,”, the president seems to be saying, as we confess. That we might all be forgiven. And, together, be washed clean of our collective crimes.
“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” ∼ James 1:22
And so it was in grand cathedral that day, as the music echoed through the online chamber. Back in Rome, however, the church was preparing a different sort of communiqué.
Cutting a violent rhetorical contrast with this revivalist euphoria was the ANC statement. Here are the linchpin paragraphs:
“SA is a sovereign state and has always respected the laws of these imperialist countries. The ANC condemns this dramatic holier-than-thou stance of these former colonisers and we would not like to relate to them on the history of master-slave relations. SA has embarked upon the process of ridding our country of state capture and related corruption. We are using our institutions and constitutional obligation to do so.
“We call on these countries to support our efforts. We do not appreciate a threatening and bullying tone. These countries decided to communicate directly with the president of our country via their embassies, an act that can be deemed as undermining and dismissive of diplomatic practices. They leaked their letters to the media, suggesting they had less than honourable intentions.”
It goes on and on, loaded with outdated communist jargon and all the best conspiratorial catch phrases: “This unwarranted act by these five countries is viewed dimly, as an act to influence the outcome of the upcoming elections.”
In his congregation sit the most despicable collection of thieves and incompetents SA has ever seen. It is a church rotten to the core
And: “The ANC wants to be clearly understood that we will not be fooled into swapping one attempt of state capture and corruption for another! This is how we view the interference of these five countries, as just another form of state capture.”
Finally, that grand sense of delusion that has played such a pivotal role in the ANC’s self-destruction: “SA has been a leading light on the global stage in tackling these matters without fear or favour.”
You have to marvel at the ANC. That one organisation could produce two such diametrically different pieces of nonsense in one week. The fact that they are both nonsense is all that unites them. The first, a religious appeal to the patriotic idea of a new SA; the second, the undiluted base instinct of a party trapped in a pre-modern time and place.
The first, a blind promise, grounded in no more than fantasy; the second, a fantasy grounded in no more than conspiracy.
What you have in the contemporary manifestation of the ANC is a church which has elected a preacher, that forgives sins before they have been confessed, and which promises hope and “total” renewal before the tide has turned. He believes he is Moses but in truth he is King Canute.
In his congregation sit the most despicable collection of thieves and incompetents SA has ever seen. It is a church rotten to the core. But he would have them all sing along, marching to one drum beat, towards the promised land. Only all of them believe the promise land is to be found in 1935.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” ∼ John 1:1
Before Ramaphosa delivered his virtual eulogy, he was in Davos, meeting with the Western imperialists, in Switzerland no less (supposedly a wicked coloniser like the rest of them) — to sing his hymn about “total renewal” and the New Jerusalem, and to beg for their money.
He spoke of “nine lost years” — in the wilderness no doubt. When he returned, Jacob Zuma tore him a new one. The congregation was displeased. It’s something many don’t get. You see, the ANC was always on the road to the promised land. It has always been marching forward.
Ramaphosa himself used to say so all the time.
“We are going to see some good things coming out of Eskom, that I promise you,” he said in June 2015. “There was no corruption, nothing to do with Nkandla was unlawful,” he said in March 2014. “The transparency that you get in the ANC is second to none,” he said in December 2012.
And, in June 2014: “We have got a few years in between, but we do want, that by 2019, we should hit the target of 5% and possibly even exceed it.”
The songs of praise will no doubt continue, the delusional suggestion that the promised land can be made manifest through blind faith alone
The promised land has always been just around the next corner. The next corner, however, is always just around next corner.
The greatest trick Ramaphosa ever pulled, as so many preachers do, is the idea that he can see all this sin for what it is, and the path to redemption. Only, he was pulled from the congregation itself, and placed behind the pulpit. And the people chose him, not because he is the good shepherd but because he is one of the flock.
The songs of praise will no doubt continue, and the delusional suggestion that the promised land can be made manifest through blind faith alone. It’s all a necessary pretence to keep the grand theatrical production that is the ANC’s broad church coming to pray every Sunday. Hymns and sermons are all it has left.
But read the book from which both Ramaphosa and the ANC have always taken their real direction, and it is filled with the kind of dangerous ideas that destroy. That is the way it is with all religions. All praise be to the great, benevolent God on high, his spirit is among us, his hidden plan fraught with suffering, yet the truth and way, to remake the world as a paradise.
His word, however, now that is a different matter. Those communiqués, they are coming thick and fast. And they describe a paradise fashioned from failure. A monument to the idea of what utopia once was, that existed generations ago and which trial and error has long since revealed to be little more than folly. Thank goodness no one in SA actually reads. Then again, even if we did, there’s nothing a few “Hail Marys” won’t solve.
• Van Onselen is the head of politics and governance at the South African Institute of Race Relations.
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